“Your voice is breaking up.” How many times have we all heard or said that these past two years? Probably second only to “You’re on mute.”
The pandemic changed the world and the way we work with digital transformation accelerating for most companies. Organisations are now supporting employees in offices as well as homes, collaborating with each other using applications that are hosted in the cloud and outside IT environments, while continuing to help the business operate at the same level or better than pre-pandemic. Needing to keep pace in this era of rapid digital transformation, Cisco is constantly finding new ways to empower organisations to be able thrive in this new reality, whilst never losing sight of the need for security to be integral to these innovations.
Earlier this year, Cisco shared its vision for Cisco Predictive Networks, with the aim of unlocking a new level of reliability and performance, helping customers evolve with today’s demands by predicting certain application and network issues before they happen.
Cloud adoption, migration to SaaS, SD-WAN, and hybrid work are some of the major drivers in digital transformation that effectively make the Internet the new corporate backbone. This Internet has no service level agreement (SLA) and delivering a great digital experience with the necessary security over a best effort Internet environment is a huge challenge that organizations face.
“Part of our response to this challenge, is to provide our clients with the best view of global Internet health, covering networks as well as top SaaS applications that organizations rely on,” says Brendan Cuthbertson, Head of Enterprise, Cisco Commercial and Regional Public Sector Sales South Africa.
“This lets our customers proactively address major unexpected network or application issues affecting them as soon as they happen by making the desired changes either on their end or their provider’s. A lot of these outages can’t be predicted, and organizations need to react quickly as soon as they happen – real-time visibility is key. However, we do believe many service disruptions can be avoided if we do a better job of looking at all the data and learning from the past. This is the focus of Cisco Predictive Networks and the origination of ThousandEyes WAN Insights.”
WAN Insights now extends ThousandEyes Internet visibility into SD-WAN health, giving organizations the ability to look at their top applications, the experience specific sets of users are facing, and how that experience can improve by learning from past behaviours. It allows for the forecasting of possible service disruptions based on analysing past behaviour and provides recommendations to adapt to this disruption and the expected improvement outcome. At this stage, it’s a recommendation with the vision to work toward more automation in the future. Once enabled, ThousandEyes WAN Insights recommendations will also be visible in Cisco vAnalytics.
From an SD-WAN deployment perspective, it means that this technology is a guiding hand, helping organisations get the most out of the SD-WAN deployments, taking the guesswork out of initial policy setup and optimization. In addition, as environments continue to evolve, organisations will be able to fine tune based on long-term recommendations to ensure the environment delivers the best digital experience possible to their users. This gives the organisation the power to move from reactive to preventative with their SD-WAN environments and maximize the digital opportunity for their business, workforce, and customers.
